4Gbps in PCI-X

Andrew Gallatin gallatin at cs.duke.edu
Thu Apr 15 07:25:24 PDT 2004


Christophe Prevotaux writes:
 > Hi,
 > 
 > Is anyone working or planning to work on these babies support
 > for FreeBSD ? 
 > 
 > http://www.astutenetworks.com/content/product/superhba.htm

Not that I know of, but if you need 4Gb/sec, have you considered
Myrinet?

I do the driver support for FreeBSD at Myricom.  We've supported
FreeBSD for quite some time.  Our latest PCIXE PCI-X host interfaces
support full duplex 4Gb/sec operation.  

For ethernet encapsulation, you get a big fat pipe that can do
3.85Gb/sec for a single TCP stream (as measured by netperf by me on
hosts running 4.8-STABLE).  This acts like a normal ethernet
interface, and can interect with normal ethernet hosts (assuming
approprite protocol conversion in the middle, which we also sell).

If you're willing to program to a different API (GM, or MX), you can
make use of OS-bypass operation, which reduces host cpu load to near
zero at the cost of using a non-sockets API.

See our web site for more details.
http://www.myri.com/

Currently, our main customer base is large linux clusters that use
the OS-bypass side of our nics.  It would be nice to get more 
FreeBSD users.  It would certainly make it easier to for me to
justify time spent on our FreeBSD drivers ;)

Drew


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